If you consider how much money is embezzled / stolen by (most) corporations by avoiding paying taxes for all the services they benefit from, in the countries they operate in, this seems a very good feature.
You can only call tax avoidance stealing money if your prior assumption is that all money earned belongs to the state as the owner, and you can only have whatever the state gives you by its generosity. That is a pretty big assumption.
I don't see what "taxes belong to the state" may mean. Taxes may mean a) some set of laws regulations that create legal framework for some money being paid to the government and b) money that has been paid to the government according to the framework above. The only way you can steal tax money is when you first pay the taxes and then get some of that money back illegally. I'm not sure there are a lot of corporations that do that. A lot of them do it legally, by means of corporate welfare, but while it can be despicable, it does not qualify as theft. Failure to pay taxes usually is illegal, but can not be sensibly defined as theft.
This comment breaks the HN guidelines by calling names, being uncivil, and last but not least by using all caps for emphasis. (Just kidding; that is least. But still unwanted.)
Please don't do these things when commenting here. Instead, please (re-)read the guidelines and follow them, by posting civilly and substantively or not at all.
Wealth is created by small companies too, perhaps even more so that the big ones. However, they don't have the resourcers to evade taxes like the big ones do.
And they usually pay royalties on said resources? Pay for rights to said resources? Trust me, we learned a long time ago how to extract $$$ for said resources.
By resources you mean financial systems, roads and other infrastructure, legal systems, access to educated workers, being defended by an army...?
I could accept a company making profit and paying no taxes if they didn't have offices, staff, use roads or electricity etc. It would be pretty hard to do anything as a company "outside" the framework of a society.
I noticed the discussion on natural resources so I just wanted to point out the obvious - that corporations exist within a society and use a multitude of important "resources" to function at all. That's why it's pretty natural to have corporate taxes too.
> I noticed the discussion on natural resources so I just wanted to point out the obvious
While what you said is certainly obvious, it had nothing to do with what I said.
> That's why it's pretty natural to have corporate taxes too.
It is absolutely idiotic to have corporate taxes. Corporations are nothing more than proxies for the shareholders. All profits are passed to the shareholders. Once they are, those shareholders then have to pay taxes on those profits.
You end up with double taxation.
In recognition of this, we create something called a capital gains tax, which is less than the normal tax rate ... and then tax corporations to compensate for that. Nice.
You end up with a situation where most of the taxes the corporations pay end up being passed to the consumer and the rich get a tax break. Is that what you support?
Get rid of capital gains, tax all income at the same level, and get rid of the corporate tax.
Money is just an unit of account, and in this context rather uninteresting. I could give you a billion Reichsmark, and you would be no better off than you would have been if I gave you a roll of toilet paper.
Corporations and individuals create wealth, which benefits us all.
If you owe money to someone and don't pay it deliberately... what else would you call it other than stealing?
Defaulting. I understand that the RIAA has succesfully popularised the term "stealing" beyond its legal definition, but that doesn't mean we should expand it even further.
